CRUCIBLE OF REVOLUTION I?
onstrations ruthlessly suppressed by the military. Long before
Gerhart Hauptmann thought of making their tragedy the subject
of one of his most stirring dramas, the sufferings of the Silesian
weavers figured in the novels of the 1840's and in the poems of
Heinrich Heine and Ferdinand Freiligrath. The year 1844 also
produced an epidemic of strikes in the calico factories of Berlin,
among the railway workers of Westphalia, and in Hamburg and
Saxony. In 1843, a "society for the education of the children of
the helpless proletariat" was organized in Breslau, and workers'
organizations of several kinds were formed in leading cities of the
German states, in vain efforts to solve the labor problem.
The problem of the emerging proletariat also had its sympa
thetic analysts among the German intellectuals. As early as 1800,
Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his Geschlossene Handelsstaat had de
scribed the anarchy of laissez faire, which deprived the worker of
the full product of his labor and gave an undue share of the profits
to the owning class. In 1835, Ludwig Gall, sometimes called the
first German socialist, issued a pamphlet in Trier which fore
shadowed the class struggle and maintained that labor was the
sole source of wealth. Georg Büchner, a dramatist of merit who
died in exile, founded the "Society for Human Rights" in 1834 in
Giessen, and Stephan Born published his first plea for the working
classes when he was only twenty.
The mid-thirties also saw the beginnings of a spiritual revolu
tion in Germany, against the church and the clerical class, and a
plea for the return to the ethics of primitive Christianity. David
Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus (1835) was one of the few books
which Weitling owned, and it may be assumed that he was thor
oughly familiar with its contents. Strauss's attempt to combine
Hegelian philosophy with Christianity and to reconcile science
and religion started a veritable spiritual renaissance in Germany
and Switzerland. Karl Gutzkow referred to the book as "the yeast
of Germany's intellectual ferment."^3 Ludwig Feuerbach's The
Nature of Christianity represented a further challenge to ortho-
(^3) Karl Gutzkow, Rückblicke auf mein Leben (Berlin, 1875), 140, 290-91,